Workbench

08/14/2004

WARNING: The following posting contains information and cheap jokes about sex. If you think sex is yucky or impolite or just generally don't think sex is anything you'd care to hear about right now, thank you very much, go here. If, on the other hand, you think sex is something you'd maybe like to read about for a while, especially if the dirty stuff is camouflaged with jokes so that it appears to be mainstream entertainment content with redeeming social value in case your spouse comes into the room and shouts, "What are you doing!", well you've come to the right place. Because here, I've got the answer, which is: "Nothing! I'm not doing anything! Look! It's jokes, not sex! Honest!"

Because every Friday is Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent, even days like today when it feels a lot like Saturday morning, which it is, technically. Fridays, lately, have been a bitch. So Saturday morning Sex Day it will have to be for a while, whether you like it or not.

I once spent an afternoon in a church filled with women who were chanting, "Vulva! Vulva! Vulva!" This was years ago, back when I was a magazine writer in California. An editor and friend named Anne Colby -- who had fun torturing me in loving, nurturing ways -- invited me to join her in attending a Worship of the Goddess service in Santa Monica. In a church filled with maybe 500 women, I was one of about five men. Whereas I would normally think of odds like that as an opportunity, I sensed instinctively that this particular male-female ratio was a problem.

I stood very politely in the back of the church while woman after woman stepped up to the lectern and railed against the male-dominated culture of violence and conquest that so dominated, presumably, Santa Monica. They didn't rail against men, really, because they seemed to accept that men were, in some way, inevitable. Mostly they didn't like the result of men, which they concluded was things like war, unfulfilling sex, and professional football. I made no eye contact with the other men attending, fearing that one of the beefy women surrounding me would interpret the look as sneering, at which point we would surely be ripped to shreads.

Anyway, at some point a very serious college professor from somewhere like Save the Redwoods Self-Actualizing College-Without-Walls got up and began to talk joyfully about the liberating effects of talking dirty. Actually, she didn't say "talking dirty." She said something like "putting voice to your womanhood." But I'm no moron, and I know smut-talk when I hear it, especially in church.

"Say it with me," she shouted from the lectern. "Say it out loud and with pride: Vulva!"

I didn't say it, but everyone else in the room kind of muttered, "vulva."

With the calm patience of a third-grade teacher, she shook her head and urged us to say it louder. And louder. And repeatedly. And louder still so they could hear it out on the violence- and conquest-infested streets of Santa Monica.

"Vulva! Vulva! Vulva!"

I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. My editor AnneColby looked at me and laughed so hard I thought she was going to fall over backwards.

There is, without question, a Cult of the Vulva out there and it is not, surprsingly, made up entirely of teenaged boys. It's made up of the kind of women who packed that Santa Monica church, women who assert their femininity not by cutting throats in the corporate world or raising their children to be Nobel Prize laureates, but by calling attention to something that I, personally, think the world already knows: They have vaginas.

Perhaps it isn't fair to generalize from my own, personal experience, but hardly a moment goes by when I, personally, am not aware that women have vaginas. You'd have to go back a long way to a moment when you could have asked me if women had vaginas and I would have said no. At least to high school, when my answer would have been something like: "Not that I've seen."

Nonetheless, there are women who get some kind of affirmation from the fact that they have utterly typical genitalia. I say, loud and with pride: Alright, I guess, if it's really important to you.

Which it apparently is, at least to Lauren Sinnott, who makes a line of "fine purses and magickal (sic) bags" which she calls Velvet Vulvas.

More than a sumptuous Renaissance bag, the Velvet Vulva represents in three-dimensional form the sacred portal to the feminine temple. Each has sumptuous fabric labia and a beautiful button clitoris. A Velvet Vulva might become your everyday bag; it might always stay on your altar; or it might be acquired for special occasions. (One of the first Vulvas I made was part of the bridal trousseau of a close friend of mine.) Naturally, what you put in your Velvet Vulva can have tremendous symbolic and magickal significance.

I haven't included a link to her website, artgoddess.com, because it's incredibly buggy and has crashed my computer three times in the last fifteen minutes. Go there at your own risk. Even if the technology works, you will be subject to a Casiotone version of the Cinema Paradiso theme that will make you want to die.

I have a policy here at Functional Ambivalent that I do not include pictures in Sex Day postings. That's because I'm concerned about the delicate sensibilities of you, my loyal reader, who might be perfectly comfortable reading about things like, for example, old people having sex in nursing homes, but do not want to be confronted by actual photography of that kind of activity.

I'm going to break that rule because you need to see these Velvet Vulvas to believe them, and I can't in good conscience send you to Art Goddess to see them, because when you're done you'll hate me. No one wants to be subject to the long and frustrating process of watching a computer reboot in the middle of Sex Day. So over there to the left somewhere is a thumbnail photo of a Velvet Vulva, which will get larger if you click on it.

Who among us would not wear this handbag with pride? I ask you: Would we not be a freer and more peaceful society if we were regularly confronted with women digging deep down into a cartoonish vagina in search of change for the parking meter? Consider the image of a woman, rushing to get to work, stuffing her Velvet Vulva with tampons to get her through the day. There's something so...well, symmetrical about it.

And, just in case you don't want a Velvet Vulva purse, you can buy a Velvet Vulva toy bag to keep your vibrator in, or even a Velvet Vulva sleeping bag to keep you warm when you're backbacking.

If, for some completely unfathomable reason, you want to put on a vulva puppet show, you're in luck. The House o' Chicks has a full line of vulva puppets that are not, as you might have guessed, tools to allow pissed-off spouses to terrify and confuse their husbands when they wake up from a long night of playing poker with the boys.

No shit, guys. Really. I woke up on the floor of the garage and, you know, I'm coming-to, and I opened my eyes and...right there in front of my face...there's this giant pussy. And it's yelling at me.

No, the purpose of the vulva puppets is to help women communicate.

Now, just for second before I go on, I want to point out: You can't make stuff like this up

Vulva puppets, in the words of the House o' Chicks website copywriter, help women share:

Yes, by all means: Buy a vulva puppet and use it to celebrate...with yourself!

Of course, if puppets aren't good enough, you can go here to see a not-at-all-embarrassed-looking woman dressed up in a complete, entire vulva costume.

What if you, a regular person, want a vulva puppet or Velvet Vulva but don't have the $300 or so it will cost to get one manufactured by a professional? Fortunately, you live in the greatest country in the world or, if you don't, you've at least got net access so you can find solutions on the always trustworthy Worldwide Web.

For example: Do you have a dollar bill in your pocket? Take it out and go here for instructions of how to make an origami vagina. Or, if you prefer, an origami pair of breasts.

But we're talking vulvas here, and once you've felt the silky texture of a professionally made vulva purse or whatever, mere crumpled paper will not suffice. No no no.

Fortunately, for the vulva hobbyist wannabe on a budget, there is All About My Vagina, a website devoted to one girl's obsession with her down there. (Sorry guys. No pictures.) Sarah, who runs the site, is a clever writer and seems remarkably rational for someone who has a website devoted to her vagina.

One of the most useful things I think I can do with this website is to write about my own vagina, and admit to everything on this site. I find that more context for my own vagina makes me feel more secure; the more I find out about other people, the less I worry about being weird, and the happier I am about my own unique vagina.

Well good. It's nice she's happy about her vagina. I can imagine her sitting quietly in a coffee shop, smiling to herself.

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt but you're smiling so beatifically. I was just wondering: What is it that makes you seem so at peace?"

"I'm happy about my vagina."

To help women come to grips with their own vaginas, Sara has included instructions on how to sew what she calls a "lucky vulva coin purse." And it's really quite lovely.

The Lucky Vulva Coinpurse has a zipper where the vaginal opening would be, to keep your treasures securely contained behind a line of teeth. You can keep other bits and bobs in the intralabial clefts—the puffy outer lips hold shut quite nicely. A Lucky Vulva would also be a hot place to store tampons and period gear, condoms, or random things you've always wanted to fish out of a vulva.

I knew a guy who made his wallet out of duct tape. But that's not really the same thing at all.

Have a lovely weekend. Maybe I'll see you somewhere. That is, if I ever open my eyes and get up off the floor of the garage.

08/13/2004

One of the gripes people have with their cable companies is that the bundling of networks into tiers forces consumers to pay for networks they don't want to watch. For example, to get ESPN I'm forced to buy a package that includes a Spanish language network. I don't speak Spanish, at least not beyond the "un otra cerveza, por favor" level.

The alternative to bundling is a system of a la carte subscription, which means each subscriber chooses and pays for only the networks he or she wants to get. A la carte programming is particularly popular among religious groups. Millions of religious parents don't get why they have to invite MTV into their homes in order to receive, say, PAX TV, a provider of wholesome and largely-Dick-Van-Dyke-based programming. They consider MTV a corrupting influence, and wouldn't want it even if it were free. That they are forced to pay for is particularly galling.

Cable companies oppose a la carte, claiming it would be expensive to impliment and administer, which is true. A lot of programmers oppose it, too, because they know that the number of people who would subscribe, for example, to Lifetime would drop considerably if it weren't sold in the same package as ESPN.

The networks' concern is only partly about audience. In all likelihood, in an a la carte environment, the audience for smaller nets would drop, and advertising rates would fall as well. But neither would drop a lot, because those who are watching the nets would also be those who would subscribe to the nets.

More than audience, this is an argument about the value of networks. Cable networks are valued based on the number of subscribers they have, with "subscribers" defined as homes into which the network is piped. Whether anyone in those homes watches or not doesn't matter. A sub is a sub, and when it comes to figuring out how much your company is worth each sub is worth several hundred dollars.

Not to pick on Lifetime, which is a perfectly wonderful network, but let's pick on Lifetime as an example. Lifetime is a network aimed at women that is standard in most basic cable packages, along with big-name nets like Discovery, ESPN, and CNN. It goes into homes that have no women in them at all, because the males in those homes want ESPN. This boosts Lifetime's number of subs, without increasing its ratings, because those men aren't watching.

Go to a la carte and those men won't subscribe, either. The women who like Lifetime subscribe and continue to watch; the men get ESPN a la carte and never give Lifetime another thought. (This works both ways. ESPN is far and away the most expensive cable net, and it would lose subs as households with no interest in sports declined to pay the $5 a month or so ESPN would command as an a la carte product.)

What makes a la carte a killer for Lifetime is the drop in the number of subs, and the coresponding drop in the value of the network. Lose half the subs, even if they weren't watching, and the net loses half its value. Part of this is offset by a theoretical increase in subscription fees, since the audience that choses to subscribe would be willing to pay more per month for a network than the audience that is forced to buy it as part of a package. Lifetime probably gets about a dime a month from me right now; if I chose to subscribe in an a la carte system, I would likely have to pay more, something like fifty cents. And, assuming I like the net enough to subscribe, I'd probably be willing to do that.

Which is where this gets interesting. You see, the National Religious Broadcasters, the trade organization that represents the interests of religious broadcasters, just came out againsta la carte programming. Pat Robertson, who sits on NRB's board of directors, has made a pot full of money using religious leverage to get his for-profit network onto cable systems everywhere. CBN is almost as common in basic cable subscription packages as Nickelodeon, and if a la carte became the law of the land, Robertson's portfolio would take a big hit.

According to this article in Broadcasting & Cable, they're doing a tap dance on the issue that would make Gregory Hines proud.

Religious broadcasters favor a la carte cable service as a way to allow viewers to screen out "indecent or offensive content" but oppose it for its potential to do "irreparable damage to religious, independent, ethnic and niche program producers."

Simply stated, the religious broadcasters understand that if you, the cable viewer, had a choice of which networks to subscribe to on cable, you, the cable viewer, probably wouldn't subscribe to religious broadcasting. The value of CBN and other religious programming services would drop precipitously, in some cases to almost nothing.

So, confronted with a choice -- money or their professed belief that families need to be protected from indecent programming -- they've decided to go with the money.

In the end, that downside trumps the upside, with NRB telling the FCC it "strongly opposes" the a la carte regimen now on the table. But it also said that many of its members support a la carte in principle and object to being "required to pay for programming they consider objectionable."

So, to recap: They're against a system when it gives their money to people they don't like, but they're in favor of it when it gives them money from people who don't like them.

08/11/2004

Second grumpiest man on the web Libertarian Jackass goes after DJs, of all things. (Grumpiest man on the web here.) LJ announces, with a mind as closed as the Bush Administration's Energy Task Force and a voice as hard as a cinderblock:

You know how I feel about the scum one finds working at bars and clubs, but let's go ahead and add DJs to the list.

I'd be up for that, of course, because I like consigning whole classes of people to the the moral dustbin. But if I did that, I'd be passing up a chance to tell a boring story about my youth, and I'm just not made that way. So, instead, I'll stick up for DJs. You see, I subsidized my college expenses by working in a bar, which makes me -- apparently -- scum. Or, at least, scummish, in the eyes of Libertarian Jackass, who I've always thought of as a friend but who now I must condemn as a judgemental old poopy butt. Which I do, without being judgemental myself even a little.

LJ quotes Viceland writer Amy Kellner, who is really, really angry about something but takes it out on DJs, instead, who she does not respect even though she is one:

It's laughable. A 70-year-old blind Ethiopian leper with 10 broken fingers can "spin" just as well as any B-list celebrity at any in-store party for some gay snowboarding jeans company. I promise.

I was not, up until just this minute, aware that there is such a thing as gay snowboarding, though it'll probably be in the next Winter Olympics along with synchronized slipping and some new sport from the Arctic Circle based on urinating compulsary patterns in the snow. I'm also somewhat confused about why one would go somewhere where there are spinning Ethiopian lepers.

Nonetheless, I'll take this opportunity to stick up for DJs, regaling you with wisdom acquired during my disco-age youth. You see, I actually worked in a disco. A real one, with flashing lights and guys dressed in white John Travolta polyester sniffing coke off their elongated fingernails in the dark corners off the dance floor. And I think being a DJ is a tough job.

There are good DJs and bad. The difference is their feel for the music and understanding of crowds. Knowing when to pump things up and when to cool things down is a skill that's very similar to comic timing or a flair for drama. I remember one conversation with Mick, the best DJ I ever knew. He spoke of managing the flow of a night's party with the kind of attention to structure that writers have to have when they craft stories.

Now, you can mock the pretense of Mick's rhetoric if you like, but the fact is that you could tell when he was working just by walking in the front door. The crowd was more up, the energy higher and more crackling. There were other things as well: The bouncers swore there were fewer fights on nights when Mick worked, and the manager said the bar take was higher. With Mick in the booth, people stayed longer, partied harder, and drank more, without ever getting surly and combative.

(Less combative was not necessarily good. Fights broke the boredom. One winter night, we threw a drunk out onto the street, forgetting that, because of construction, the street wasn't there. He landed in a ten-foot pit knee-deep with ice water. He stayed there for an hour, freezing, until someone managed to pull him up. We loved stuff like that. So, ah, maybe I was scum.)

Conversely, when one of the other DJs was working, things never quite got off the ground. Crowds dwindled, people sat bored in their seats, and when the lights came up at last call there was a curious sense of relief.

The DJ mattered; there must be skill involved.

And as to people in clubs being scum, well, it' worth noting that Mick was a doting father and never drank, smoked, did drugs or cheated on his wife. He just liked keeping a room full of people dancing.

08/09/2004

Because Alan Keyes is running for the Senate in Illinois, I have added a new category to Functional Ambivalent. This is not a category reserved exclusively for Mr. Keyes, but he will no doubt be frequently seen there. The category is: Signs of the Apocalypse.

In addition, I'm adding Unfogged to the blogroll, because I enjoy Unfogged a lot. It's written by a couple of guys, one of whom goes by the name Unf, and the other Ogged. Hence, Unfogged. They go right up to the top because I've been reading them for a while and my only complaint is that they don't write enough. Bastards. It's kind of politics and kind of just stuff, all set in a cool, minimalist design that feels to me like I'm in Norway, but without the pervasive herring smell. Or, since they're apparently in Chicago, the smell of Italian beef sandwiches.

Jack O'Toole goes from "We'll See..." to "Every Day" because he's a serious guy. I shouldn't have insulted him by putting him in "We'll See..." I hope he forgives me. It's serious politics from a pro, and it's apparently his real name. Sorry about the jacks, joke. I mean...oh, you know.

The Luxury of Conceit disappers, because the blog has gone inactive. I'm not sure why I'm including a link to a dead blog. Maybe some of you just like reading last entries. For you morbid goobers, here's how Luxury of Conceit's last post begins:

So, what does an unemployed man waiting out his severance pay do with his newfound time?

Apparently, it's not blogging. He lost his job right after I linked to him. I hope I'm not as guilty as I look.

I'm also tossing Belle de Jour because I never read her anymore, and I really do try to keep this blogroll a set of links that I read. I don't know...it's nothing she did. It's probably me. I'm just not ready for a relationship. Or something. Anyway, the magic's gone, and she'll probably never notice I've left.

I'm adding Colby Cosh to "We'll See..." because he's Canadian, and with all the snide remarks I make about Canadia, I figure I ought to have a Canadian on the blogroll. Canadia, after all, deserves a chance to make a few snide remarks to me, too. And Colby Cosh is just the man to do it, except that he's real polite that way Canadians are polite.

Finally, I'm adding War Liberal to "We'll see..." not because I'm worried that the blog won't work out, because I've been reading War Liberal pretty steady for a couple of months and it's really good. No, I'm putting War Liberal in "We'll See..." because I need someone to keep an eye on Colby Cosh. Frankly, all that Canadian politeness reminds me a little of Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and I'm not comfortable leaving him alone.

There should be more in "We'll See..." but I'm not finding a lot out there in blogworld that gets me up and jumping. Maybe I'm just in a grumpy mood. Maybe the whole blogworld is in a slump, or just coasting through the end of the summer.

Either way, War Liberal is off to purgatory, even though he's worthy of better. Sometimes, I don't know how I can live with myself.

It'll be great. You can sit all day in a stuffy church gym. There are Coke machines over by the bathroom but they don't give change.

Most of the afternoon, no one comes in, but the before- and after-work crowds are pretty good. The elderly volunteers running the polls sometimes take a little snooze when it's slow. One time, the guy who was supposed to open the doors of the church overslept, and the polls opened two minutes late. Is that, like, a serious irregularity? Do we need to call Jimmy Carter?

When it's all over, you can hold a press conference, but no one will come.

I'm in favor of having international inspectors monitor American elections. The whole world should see just how dull our democracy is. No guns, no serious threats, no trucks disgorging army troops to pack the ballot box, no mile-long lines of peasants waiting for a chance to be heard. Just boring old middle class Americans, changing the world every couple of years.

Boy, I thought liberals took things seriously. Get a load of Greg Piper, a conservative who apparently got his sense of humor at a Soviet re-education camp. Here's Greg not losing perspective at all while going after the self-described "fake news" program, The Daily Show:

In Stewart's opening anchor segment Tuesday, he showed a clip of President Bush Monday at the Rose Garden saying that he wanted to create a national director of intelligence position, because the nation was "in danger," then they pulled another Bush soundbite from a recent Republican fundraiser where he said the nation was "safer." Stewart said Bush's two statements reminded him of a word with "flip" and "flop," then decided sarcastically that the word was "strong leader." I wonder if Stewart can really be this thick-headed, or whether it was just an easy "gotcha" joke with his monkey-see-monkey-laugh audience of blank-slate college students.

Greg, babe: It's a comedy show. Get a grip. Not every joke is a threat to the American Way.

For those of you younger than dirt, the Yippies were antiwar protesters that employed not-entirely-serious means to jolt the establishment. For example, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman once organized a protest during which, he claimed, the Yippies would use psychokinetic powers to levitate the Pentagon. The media gave the protest heavy coverage because it was so ridiculous, and all the very serious journalists savored the chance to make Hoffman and the Yippies look stupid. Which was the whole point. Hoffman and his Yippie friends got a huge amount of airtimeat the small cost of dignity that they didn't even care about.

Now we have Alan Keyes, who has no chance of getting elected and owes more than a half-million dollars on his two doomed Presidential campaigns. (Thanks to Roger Ailes.) Keyes shows all the signs of running a Yippie-class dada campaign. His first little bit of performance art is from his blog:

Obama Campaign in Trouble -- Barack Obama seems to have seen the writing on the wall, and he's now terrified of the prospect of running against Alan Keyes.

This is, of course, insane. But that's the whole point. Levitating the Pentagon was insane, too.

Keyes is playing the Yippie game. He doesn't care about dignity or civility or pride. He just wants to cause trouble and get on television. He's going to do nothing this election sseason but insane stuff, ratcheting up his own apparent symptoms to keep the media intersted. Illinois Dems would do well to remember that the Yippies made a significant contribution to ending the Vietnam War. Never underestimate the power of pure, unbridled lunacy.

If I were smarter and harder working than I am, I would write a long thing about how conservatives in general and the Bush Administration in particular are shifting risk from government and corporations to individuals. Risk shifting is the cornerstone of the conservative economic philosophy. The world, according to conservatives, will be better when each of us is responsible for his own well-being, with no government to get in the way.

Take, for example, the President's proposed privatization of Social Security. In President Bush's world, Social Security is an abomination that keeps people from doing what they want with their money, which is to invest in high-return stocks. The President wants to take Social Security money out of government's hands, allowing people to invest as they see fit. He promises greater returns on investment if this happens.

The issue he doesn't address is risk. Under Social Security, you know how much you're going to get every month. Barring the bankruptcy of the federal government, that's what you're going to get. It's not going to go up a lot, but it's also not going to go down. There is very little risk.

Under President Bush's system, the rate of return on your savings would be much more volatile. If the stock market is up when you retire, you make more money. If it's down, you're on dogfood and saltines until the next bull market. The risk is yours, not the government's. Individuals watching their quarterly 401-K statements go up and down understand market risk on a visceral level.

Unfortunately, I'm not all that smart or all that hard working, so I haven't taken the time to research and write anything. Jacob Hacker at New Republic Online, on the other hand, has. In a long piece called "False Positive," he has used risk shifting and a few other factors to explain why people don't feel as good about the rising economy as Republicans think they should. The crux of his point is risk, and people's understanding that nothing is as secure as it once was.

What goes up also goes down. And, for most Americans, downward mobility is far more painful than upward mobility is pleasurable. In the 1970s, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman gave a name to this bias--"loss aversion." Most people, it turns out, aren't just highly risk-averse--they prefer a bird in the hand to even a very good chance of two in the bush. They are also far more cautious when it comes to bad outcomes than when it comes to good outcomes of exactly the same magnitude. The search for economic security reflects a basic human desire to guard against losing what one already has.

The pundit class assumes that Americans' dour economic attitude is caused by ignorance of the statistically obvious ecomonic "Bush Boom," as Republicans like to call it, or the pervasive bias of the libral media, which just won't feature anything but bad news. In fact, according to Hacker, people feel less economically optimistic because they're more more economically vulnerable. They know they face more risk now than they did a decade ago, and they're catching on to the fact that that vulnerability is the result not of global economic shifts or emerging technology, but of conservative philosophy which, put into practice, deliberately shifts risk from big pools of people onto individuals.